Cognitive Maps: More Info

I’ve been in a lot of Ottawa taxis today, meeting all sorts of people involved in Service Canada. I used the cognitive map as a way of recording the perspectives of interviewees. It's the first time I've done it concurrently with interviewing, rather than doing it after the fact as a way of making sense of my notes. I’ve used a couple of pictures of my first drafts in this post, to show you what the scribblings look like.

For the benefit of those I might be seeing in the next few days, and those who asked me about cognitivemapping today, I thought I’d post up a bit more information about it.

The notes below are by Professor Jake Chapman, with whom I teach systems thinking at the National School of Government.I can also recommend a very detailed set of instructions about how to do cognitive maps in this paper.

Cognitive mapping is based upon Kelly’s Theory of Personal Constructs. An individual’s constructs are their way of making sense of the world – and they also condition how they experience the world in the future.

A cognitive map is a model of ‘the system of concepts’ used by an individual to communicate the nature of a problem. Visually it looks much like a multiple cause diagram, but there are a number of differences both in its construction and in the

conventions it uses. In work with clients you can abotain, through interviewing, a cognitive map from each of the senior managers involved. You can then tuse the maps to explore differences in the way the problem is perceived – and can also combine maps to produce a ‘bigger picture’ that can be used as the basis for agreed action. This whole approach is based upon the assumption that the manager is involved in the psychological construction of their world, rather that the perception of some objective world.

Cognitive maps are extremely useful at demonstrating differences in perception or world views. The map shows how people with different perspectives reason differently about the world or problem or situation. This can be of enormous benefit in complex situations where differences in view are obviously present, but not addressed (other than at the level of argument or negating each other).

It is critical to realise that a cognitive map is as accurate a representation as possible of another person’s way of thinking. It is not my view of how they think – it is a model of how they actually think based on their own words and cannot be regarded as valid unless checked by the individual whose thinking is being represented. It is important to use the person’s own words in the map.

A key insight from construct theory is that you can clarify the meaning of a concept by asking the person “as opposed to what?”. One of my Open University colleagues once had the task of resolving serious problems in the management committee of a large national charity. After interviewing everyone he noticed that they all described their meetings as ‘sticking to the agenda’. When he did follow up interviews, which were aiming towards a cognitive map of each person’s view, he asked “meetings sticks to the agenda .. as opposed to what?” He received an enormous range of answers, including the following:waste time

• make decisions
• allow people to rabbit on
• doing any creative thinking about our problems
• let people speak out
• deal with anything urgent where we might have an impact

In a cognitive map a person's construct is represented by the original phrase (called the positive pole of the construct), three dots and then the opposite (also called the negative pole). Thus

meetings stick to the agenda … making decisions

The best way to read this is to interpret the three dots as “rather than” or “as opposed to”.

(Jake Chapman)

I’m noticing some interesting differences and similarities between the cognitive maps I made today while at Service Canada and the ones I've made from last week. So for instance, today, it was significant how big a theme the issue of a really coherent vision was - and how substantially the vision (of a service-centred organisation focused on the citizen) has been embedded at the front line and in the executive management. The themes of ‘good relationships’ were much less significant today than they have been in my interviews on the East Coast of America. Which leads me to wonder if one can substitute a bit for the other.